Sometimes the set Bible readings have a powerful, uncanny contemporary impact. Today is one of those days but it takes work to realise it. Values matter, leadership matters, but Grace undergirds everything.
The first Reading of Jeremiah is part of the description of a cosmic battle, which was written for those in exile to Babylon.
4:23 I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.
4:24 I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.
4:25 I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.
4:26 I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD, before his fierce anger.
The extreme descriptions are a form of uncreation, as Norman Habel a leading eco-theologian describes. The terrifying vision that turns the earth into a lunar surface or a bombed city, does not deviate from the cosmic battle, uncreation interprets it. Theologically, politically, socially, the Babylonian invasion of Judah and Jerusalem meant the end of the world and the cessation of the created order for the community. Life in the land is over no human are present. In this mythical conception, earth, animals, and cities form an organic interdependent whole and their destruction by Yahweh’s angry decree is the result of human evil.
And we read this in the time that Ukraine has been invaded by Russian soldiers, at the whim of a leader with a vision of empire-building. Just like Babylon. The costs are terrifying too. Leadership is such a responsibility. And it is unbelievably sad, Russia has cultural tendency towards making Czars, with costs for Russians as well as Ukrainians. The last real Czar Nicholas II was the cousin of King George V, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather.
The Queen is dead, long live the King. A day we knew would come but never realized what it would provoke, in the best sense. It invites us to reflect. What place had a monarchy in times of democracies. Does it have a value if democracy is threatened by popularists who pander to short term interests and immature choices, when long term realities must demand difficult decisions and profound change. This season of Creation, the strength of Jeremiah, expose democratic leaders who only seek to please and encourage the status quo. Does monarchy with its longer-term vision offer a stabilising effect? King Charles has gone out of his way to affirm a continuity of values and goals and these were at the heart of the complaint of Jeremiah and the call of Jeremiah to people who had lost everything, not to give up on the core values of who they are.
My brush with the Royal family is vicarious: I talk about them through other people, a one person separation. It is a mixed blessing in my view in the UK, and you find God thinks so too in the Bible, in fact God does not want the people to have a king and even when God accepts their demands, their king is not to be like others. The people of God are to practice a theocracy. The One God, Yahweh comes first, and the king serves Yahweh not his own needs. In London I met Rev. Malcolm Johnson, a leading Anglican cleric who was chaplain to the Queen, and then defender of gay and lesbian Christians and tolerance. But he never spoke much of her, so my more intimate stories of royalty came through a friend I met in a gay club; we met behind a pillar because both of us did not want to be on camera. A TV programme was making a documentary. I was still a candidate for the ministry during an ambiguous time of tolerance and he was, well, a worker at the ‘pile of bricks at the end of the Strand’ He meant Buckingham Palace. He ordered the food for the Royal Household, and told me stories of the Queen Mum who rang, cross her drink had not arrived, ‘when you queens down there stop what you are doing there is one Queen up here waiting for her gin’. Then I made an easy friendship with a remarkable musician, he must be nearly eighty now, but twenty-five years ago he was harpist for Prince Charles. I found my prejudice that Charles was old fashioned and out of touch contradicted with stories of his organic farming, humanitarian outlook and Christian faith.
Nevertheless, the ambiguity of monarchy is inevitable despite the quality of a monarch, through the colonial past, through our tendency to be competitive, class based and manipulative, and I have witnessed how people representing monarchy assume superiority. It is even unconscious but it harms.
Such a contrast that for Elizabeth, she became queen unexpectedly and sincerely, her lifelong, and she put God’s way before her own. Her qualities make an easy liaison with the story Jesus told about a shepherd and a lost sheep. It is a shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, which the Queen did in her way, through a golden cage. I have no doubt Elisabeth took inspiration from this story of Jesus for the service she gave to the nation. Bringing home the lost, was often a theme that came out in her Christmas message.
The original setting of Jesus’ story is impossible to know but we do know that his followers turned to this metaphor to sum him up. It describes his leadership and his nature. There were no visual descriptions of what Jesus looked like, and no drawings. The first references we have to him are with alphabetic letters like the pneumonic, lcthus, that means fish, or a fish sign, but then Jesus the Good shepherd was the first portrayal of him on stone coffins and as sculptures. It was the most popular first presentation of Jesus, not Jesus crucified or Jesus on a throne, but Jesus that shepherd who sought out the lost.
Christians identified themselves as the lost. Certainly for those outside Jewish identity, who wished to join a Covenanting God. Or those broken by life, Or guilty of cheating, lying, stealing, Or confused by seeing evil prosper and sensing a powerlessness to resist it. Following this new religious movement, appealed because it met the fear of death, and what lay beyond death, it re-created society based on sharing and open-hearted giving. It was an antidote to the domination and violence, fear, killing and control, that so deeply contradicted what was good. That lost sheep still mattered. The experience of being lost and found was a real experience of those following Jesus the Christ.
We are alive at a time when we hear this parable of the lost sheep afresh. We realise this presence of God, is literally for the lost sheep, or lost panther, monarch butterfly, wetland, coral reef. That God counts sparrows as well as humans and I am glad King Charles knows this. Despite the mixed blessings of monarchy, the Christian faith continues through him, as a diverse and generous faith, to let the shepherd go out for the lost, with wisdom, policies and actions; that is the sort of head of state we need. A head of state who trusts the Grace of God trumps any democracy and dethrones all monarchs.
Lets pray that together we can live this out; as it is Christ’s way.
Amen.